But sharda she’s got nada, she achesfor an affaire, and dreams of pogeythrough years of nix. The game nanti works

-not for her. She prefers a heador back slum to the meat rack. Fact is,she’ll end up in the charpering carsey

of Jennifer Justice. What is thisqueer ken she’s in? Give her an auntieor a mama. The bones isn’t needed just yet.

Though she’s a bimbo bit of hard,she’s royal and tart. And girl, you knowvadaing her eek is always bona.

This week’s poem takes a walk on the linguistic wild side. Adam Lowe’s Vada That (Look at That) draws much of its vocabulary from Polari, with some additional slang phrases invented by the author. Lowe has provided a handy glossary, reproduced at the end of this piece: one of the online urban slang dictionaries may also prove useful in deciphering some of the non-Polari lingo. The most important point for the new reader to remember is that the “she” in the poem is a “he”.

Polari is a cant or cryptolect, “used by various unrelated groups – including, but not limited to, actors, circus and fairground showmen, gay subculture, the criminal underworld …” Combining Italian, Romani, Yiddish, Cockney rhyming slang, back-slang, and so on, its original purpose was to exclude outsiders and law-enforcers from users’ conversations. Although it has probably largely outlived that particular purpose, cultural interest in it has recently revived.

The first line of Vada That acts both as a fanfare and a warning. It alerts us to the literary device, the poem’s Polari dress code, and sets up the swaggering patrol of a character only ever referred to as she, and so somewhat generic. Lowe revels in the alliterative possibilities in the opening tercets, before timing a neat slip into comedy camp directed at the reader: “Mais oui,/ she’s got your number, duckie.”

S/he’s tough, glamorous, and verging on the wrong side of Lily Law, reminding us that street prostitution is still illegal in the UK, and blatant cruising can ask for all sorts of trouble. Lowe’s protagonist is one of the beautiful and damned, London-style. He may be a youngish Dilly boy, but he embodies the old music-hall tradition, that of Burlington Bertie from Bow, for one, as performed by the brilliant male impersonator, Ella Shields. Penniless, homeless and half-starved, Bertie still strove to cut a daily dash on the Strand, if not the Dilly.

The language itself seems to create both character and milieu. It pulls the recent past into the contemporary picture, a street-voice rough-riding over the niceties of anti-discrimination legislation as a reminder that homophobic harassment and violence remain potent forces. Polari no longer conceals sexual orientation, but perhaps it flags up the psychological armoury needed for survival on the social margins – resilience, self-respect, quick-wittedness and solidarity. Lowe’s figure is timeless. Intrinsic to his identity is the sense of style as courage, and the language itself operates as a kind of hard, glittering shield. Its effect can be euphemistic, allowing reference to sexual acts which straight society might still consider shocking. But there’s a sassy physicality and comedy in phrases like “tipping the brandy” which the more explicit idioms fail to catch.

Lowe’s speaker admires but doesn’t patronise the protagonist he’s describing. The latter is emotionally needy, certainly: he clearly hasn’t made a fortune on the game. But he’s complex beyond any stereotype – “royal and tart” could hardly be bettered as a quick sketch of his mind and manner (even in Polari). A glow of affection follows him around from stanza to stanza. It’s tempting to think of him as Lady Polari herself, the language personified.

Adam Lowe is a versatile and widely-published young writer whose poems, including this one, appear in Ten: The New Wave,published by Bloodaxe and The Complete Works II. This anthology brings together work by 10 emergent, UK-based black and Asian poets, and is edited by Karen McCarthy Woolf. It was published in 2014, following on from Ten: New Poets (2010). These are sparkling collections, reflecting not only the the talents of the contributors, but the spirit of the founder of the Complete Works poetry mentoring scheme, Bernardine Evaristo. If you want to zhoosh up your Bona Parle, have a vada.